Something I was adamant about was that the movie [Everybody Lovess Somebody] wouldn't end with, oh, marriage saved [the main character]. They're married and she's OK. I was very pushing on having the ending be that she made an inner growth of healing so that she can then have the ability and the space to love and be loved by someone else, and that love is open-ended and doesn't mean they're going to get married tomorrow and all her problems are solved.

I told my friend - we were working on a movie together - and he gave me a script and asked me to give him notes. And they were all male characters, and I said, "You know what would make this character more interesting?" And he asked what - and it's this road trip between three guys, basically, one older man, one 30-year-old and a 13-year-old mechanic. And I said, "If you make the 13-year-old a girl, and you make her an Indian-American mechanic." And he said, "What do you mean?" And I said, "Yeah, don't change anything in the script about him, and just make it a her."

I also have to be careful of what it says about women. I get a lot of scripts that only talk about women's appearances and what they look like. I think we're tired of having to meet this standard and not being asked what our talents or abilities are.

I should have asked for credit - but he has no idea how amazing it is that a character that was written as a boy can be equally written for a girl. It's like you said, just write a character as if it were a man, and then turn it and make it into a woman. It's like, we're human beings, after all.

The music in the movie [Everybody Loves Somebody] is very much hand-picked specifically because it's our history and our traditions. The themes are universal.

I felt really strongly about this script [ Everybody Loves Somebody] because, like you said, it's a very specific way of life.

I tell [scriptwriters] I think [their scripts] has too many stereotypes, that even the way they come in and out of Spanish doesn't really make sense, it feels forced.